[GRASS-dev] cmake

[Sören Gebbert]

Dear Hamish,

Hamish schrieb:
> I am not advocating move GRASS to it, as the build system seems to work
> pretty well, but I would like to hear about the pros/cons of using cmake
> instead of automake?

Cmake is a cross plattform make system.
http://www.cmake.org/HTML/Features.html

In the company i'm working, we use cmake to compile VTK/Qt projects
on Windows and Unix boxes.
And we do this with only one Cmake file for all plattforms.
And this works very well. On Linux boxes Makefiles are generated, on 
windows boxes MS Visual C++ project files are generated by cmake.

Cmake is IMHO much easier to code then the autotools stuff.
So hopefully many more devs will be able to fixe build system issues.
Cmake is written in pure C++, so you only need a C++ compiler to get it 
to run, there are no other dependencies.
The Makefiles which are generated are very sophisticated, on my dual cpu 
machine at work cmake decides automatically how to compile independent 
libs in parallel, if you type make -j4. So not only the compiling is 
parallel also the linking.

Cmake supports the software quality assurance system Dart 
(http://public.kitware.com/Dart/HTML/Index.shtml)
and also testing frameworks.
Cmake is open source!

And with cmake a VTK/GRASS interface will be much easier to implement. :)

But the cmake config procedure is a bit different from the configure
system and we all have to learn a new build system.

I would like to see that grass switches from autotools to cmake.
And i would be happy to support this step.
Also if we want to establish GRASS on windows systems, this will
be valuable.

There is a nice article why KDE switched to cmake:
http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/

Best regards
Soeren

> 
> 
> thanks,
> Hamish
> 
> _______________________________________________
> grass-dev mailing list
> grass-dev at grass.itc.it
> http://grass.itc.it/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev
> 
>